Editor’s note: This article is the final part of a three-part series about Blair County’s state-mandated recycling program.

By William Kibler

bkibler@altoonamirror.com

In October, a New York Times article by John Tierney claimed that the recycling movement was “floundering.”

The national recycling rate has stalled, he argued.

It deserves to stall, because recycling makes sense only for paper and metals, which account for 90 percent of its potential for greenhouse gas reduction, he argued.

The rest ought to go to landfills, Tierney wrote.

The main “benefit” for recycling other materials is the good feeling it generates for true believers who have been pushing for years to recycle more and more, he wrote.

The article inspired a defensive backlash from recycling advocates, including John Frederick, executive director of the Intermunicipal Relations Committee, which operates the state-mandated curbside recycling program for Altoona, Logan Township, Hollidaysburg and Tyrone.

“Once you exclude paper products and metals, the total annual savings in the U.S. from recycling everything else in municipal trash – plastics, glass, food, yard trimmings, textiles, rubber, leather – is only two-tenths of 1 percent of America’s carbon footprint,” Tierney wrote.

It’s cheaper to send those materials to landfills, he argued.

Recycling advocates once argued that preserving space in those landfills was important, but the landfill shortage they predicted never materialized, Tierney wrote.

And while landfills may be unpleasant, there’s plenty of space in the rural areas where they’re located to buffer them from neighbors, he argued.

Feeling ‘virtuous’

The continued support for recycling from its advocates lacks a practical basis, he wrote.

“It (only) makes people feel virtuous, especially affluent people who feel guilty about their enormous environmental footprint,” Tierney writes.

In a similar way, Bucknell professor Thomas Kinnaman recently argued in an interview on NPR’s “Here and Now” that while it’s beneficial to recycle aluminum, bi-metal cans and paper products, because recycling them is much less intensive than making them from virgin materials, the dynamic is different for other materials.

By contrast, “it’s fairly comparatively easy to make plastic and glass from scratch,” Kinnaman told the show.

Communities that recycle those materials only do so because it’s the law or because their citizens “love recycling,” he wrote in an email to the Mirror.

If citizens in the Altoona area are making no such demands for universal recycling, “then perhaps Altoona should simply do whatever necessary to satisfy state law and nothing else,” he wrote.

The advocates quarrel with Tierney and Kinnaman point-by-point.

Creating jobs

Tierney accuses recycling enthusiasts of being seduced by emotion at the expense of practicality, but the industry supports 471,000 jobs, directly and indirectly, and $106 billion per year in economic activity, wrote Mark Lichtenstein, CEO of the National Recycling Coalition in an open letter to Tierney.

Tierney says landfilling is cheaper than recycling for many materials, but – at least when the commodities market is strong – that’s false, according to the Closed Loop Fund Team.

Municipalities must pay landfills to take trash, but ideally they pay nothing for recycling centers to take recyclables, the team wrote.

Tierney says the national recycling rate has stalled around 35 percent, but the actual trend has been upward since 1990, according to the Closed Loop Fund.

Kinnaman is right that recycling of glass, compared to making it from scratch, doesn’t save as much energy as recycling aluminum, Frederick said.

But it still saves 2.7 million BTUs per ton of glass recycled, Frederick said.

Likewise, recycling PET plastic saves 30 million BTUs per ton recycled, while recycling HDPE plastic saves 51 million BTUs per ton, compared to making those products from scratch, Frederick said.

Recycling glass also eliminates environmental issues connected with extracting the silica, soda ash and limestone needed for virgin manufacturing, Frederick said.

Likewise, recycling plastic minimizes or eliminates toxic emissions of nickel, ethylbenzene, ethylene oxide and benzene generated by virgin manufacture, Frederick said.

Tierney said landfills are welcomed in rural areas, but he fails to appreciate environmental deficits like “migrating smells,” excess traffic and other “quality of life” issues, Lichtenstein told the Mirror.

Throwing things away creates problems for the people for whom that “away” is “here,” Lichtenstein said.

Tierney “misses the boat on the nascent circular economy” and doesn’t take account of new materials being designed for recycling, Lichtenstein wrote.

Radical conservation

Lichtenstein’s father used to tell his son about the World War II years in the U.S., when people exercised radical conservation – going as far as peeling the aluminum off gum wrappers.

It would be hard to justify something that extreme in today’s “fast world,” but there’s something to be said for the ethic it represents, he said.

“My ethical self is of the belief that everything that can be recycled should be,” he said.

Recycling is nature’s way, he said.

Throwing stuff away is not, he said.

When it completes its season in the sun, a leaf falls to the ground and decomposes, becoming soil, he said. That is natural.

But modern man invests energy in creating products like packaging, which, after a short interval, gets thrown away, he said.

The cycle “never really gets closed, like in nature,” he said. “It’s almost a sin.”

The current down market for recyclables is a real problem, but all commodities markets are cyclical, and people just need to “weather the storm,” Lichtenstein said.

The Tierney article would never have been written in 2011 and 1995, when prices were high, he said.

Meanwhile, people who recycle should keep “quality” in mind and follow preparation rules, he said.

Recyclables are not waste, but rather “feed stock” for manufacturing processes, he said.

A current thrust in the recycling community calls for localizing decisions to achieve “the highest and best use” for recyclables, Lichtenstein said.

On St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he has worked as a consultant, partyers generate lots of glass bottles, but the island is isolated from recycling markets.

“The purist in me would say I want all the glass to be consolidated, shipped maybe an hour to San Juan, Puerto Rico, then transferred to Jacksonville or Argentina,” where it could be remanufactured into bottles again, he said.

“(But) the realist in me would say, ‘are you kidding?”

An analysis showed that it made more sense to crush the glass and use it beneath roads and in septic drains on the island, he said.

Education

Education is the most important characteristic of a good recycling program, according to DEP spokesman John Repetz.

It’s especially important in schools, according to Pope.

Kids who get the message will nudge their parents not to throw away what should go in the blue recycling bin, said Tim Brown, Logan Township manager and IRC board member.

There’s no “magic bullet,” but the more people see evidence of others recycling, the more it will take hold, Pope said.

It needs to happen in the home, at businesses and in public spaces like parks, she said.

“So it becomes second nature,” she said.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 949-7038.